


JOHNNY CHRIST AND THE LOVE LAKE VALLEY MIRACLES

by leepepper



Series: STRANGETOWN [1]
Category: Christian Bible
Genre: Aliens, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Biblical Allusions (Abrahamic Religions), Bisexuality, F/M, Fantastic Racism, Football, Gen, Hate Crimes, High School, Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Underage Drinking, Infidelity, M/M, Multi, Polyamory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-25
Updated: 2020-01-25
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:27:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 9,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22409437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leepepper/pseuds/leepepper
Summary: when mary christ of love lake valley starts sleeping around with the old alien doctor on the lakefront, she’s blessed with a copper-headed apple green child with strange powers and a bleeding, beating, gold leaf heart. this is his story: the tale of johnny christ, love lake valley miracle.
Relationships: Elohim | God | Allah/Mary Mother of Jesus | Maryam bint Imran, Jesus Christ & Mary Mother of Jesus | Maryam bint Imran, Jesus Christ/Judas Iscariot, Jesus Christ/Judas Iscariot/Mary Magdalene, Jesus Christ/Mary Magdalene, Mary Mother of Jesus | Maryam bint Imran/Joseph of Nazareth
Series: STRANGETOWN [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1612759
Comments: 4
Kudos: 7





	1. NATIVITY

**Author's Note:**

> this is a chapbook that's about a year and a half, maybe two years old at the time of its posting. it's inspired by too much sims 2 lore and part of a series based around the love lake valley setting i've been developing for four or five years now.
> 
> i didn't hit the underage marker because there's nothing explicit, but johnny is a teenager and jude is an adult and they are, in fact, in a relationship. proceed with caution.

#  _NATIVITY_

_i'm thinking more apple than chartreuse._

Mary Christ wakes to the _BEEP-BEEP_ of the bedside alarm and the impossible sensation of seasickness. Her heart has somehow moved into the basement apartment just below her diaphragm. She’s thinking it’s just a bug – the heart thing _and_ the seasick thing – and that she can go on uninterrupted in her life of crossword puzzles and homemade casseroles and sitting, mostly cross-legged and far from patient, at home while Joe fixes every architectural issue in Love Lake Valley – but then Gabby comes trotting into the bathroom with her perpetually sad, fat Pit Bull face and says to her, “You’re pregnant. Congratulations,” before running out in a flurry of _tick-tack_ ing claws against the cherrywood floor, barking and ready for her morning walk.

She’s been visiting Mister L – the old green-skinned doctor cum architect with the peapod-shaped house on the lake. Whispers say he’s been in The Valley the very longest, that he built the town’s very first houses and holds supernatural gardening powers in his appropriately emerald skin. Three nights ago, Mary swaddled his robe of terry cloth around her olive curves and asked him barefoot in the kitchen, “Where are you from, anyway?” 

Mister L turned his bulging black eyes on her, those great obsidian beads in his bulbous key lime cranium. “Nowhere you’ve ever heard of, baby.” He smiled as if he’d been told some inside joke. “Now get over here and let me check out those adenoids.” She hasn’t paid for a checkup in months.

Mary smokes her last cigarette on the front porch and contemplates calling the intergalactic internist. This had to have happened in the launch pod, or perhaps on the granite island last week, when she and the doctor were feeling adventurous. The Gardinier boy waves at her from across the street; she waves back until her tobacco halo is nearly opaque. Her last time with Joe was a whole six months ago. What would she tell him when she began to balloon outwards in the middle and started driving him out of bed with her uncontrollable flatulence? _The magic elves raped me in my sleep?_ Or even better – _Surprise! Your sperm is a slow-release time bomb?_

They did have _many_ wire hangers.

Over dinner, divine inspiration strikes.

“Remember last weekend, when you were out fishing in Radiator Springs? Well, I was abducted and inpregnated by aliens.” She circles the pad of her index around the rim of her glass of iced tea. “So, yeah.” _Cough_. “I’m pregnant.” 

It’s not as far from the truth as it could be.

Joe goes still with his fork spearing zucchini and tomato. Suddenly the ratatouille is incredibly interesting, because he won’t meet her eyes. 

“Aliens?”

“Yep.”

“Impregnated?”

“Yep.”

Gabby yawns expansively at Mary Christ’s feet. Love Lake Valley is a bright buzzing presence around them, borderline fluorescent just past the stroke of 5:30 PM. Mary can see the thought bubbles blooming and popping ‘round Joe’s curly red head – one moment there are glyphs of spaceships and baby monitors filling them, but they eventually turn as they always do to backsplash and hardwood. Joe’s work. Whoop-de-doo.

“Thank God business is booming, right?” he says around a mouthful of veg.

Mary finds the living room window all the way across the house with her eyes and murmurs, “Oh yes.” These are her last words of the night. When she makes a mess doing the dishes, the water goes all down her stomach and dries cold under the air conditioner. Joe laughs at her when she comes out of the kitchen looking like a clumsy twelve year-old. Then it’s Family Feud and virgin cocktails until bedtime. So it goes for the Christs.

* * *

The baby speaks to her. His voice sounds like it comes out of a tin can. Do the decibels ricochet off and against the walls of her womb? Is he talking on the phone in a place with bad service? Mary wonders these things every time he starts, almost always laughing characteristic ringing, echoing, moon language laugh.

Most of the time it’s just vibrant white noise, alien babbling transmitted to her ears from the heart of a dying star somewhere far away. Last week, though, as Mary stood pumping gas into her ‘99 Honda Civic at the Fuel and Wash, a human word came hurtling through the static like a fastball – **_9!@ &_ ** **MOMMA** **_!%4$_ **

Mary grasps at her belly as if it’s been physically struck. It is an auditory quickening – the first time she’s been made aware of any human presence within her. “Baby?” she asks, and immediately feels like an idiot for not having named him yet.

 **_8w31@#_ ** **Mommy!** **_7% &02_ ** **Hello!** **_1%8#!_ **

Around the house and in bed at night, vacuuming around Gabby’s spot on the floor and staring up at the popcorn ceiling, she talks back. Joe will shoot her queer looks over his newspaper and grumble beside her in the queen-size – “Go to bed, hon, it’s one in the morning.” – but she puts every thought of shame and self-consciousness out of her mind. She hasn’t felt so excited since she was a teenager; she hasn’t felt so excited since she fell in love for the first time.

“How are you feeling today?” **_39$5%!_ ** **Ummmm…hungry!!2 &Brussselsproutsplease?!** **_93!@0 &_ **

“Can you hear? That’s Mozart.” **_93!@0 &_ ** **Fast and loud!%7I liked Black Sabbath can you bring that back thank you!** **_89#@0k_ **

Baby likes 70s metal and the sound the washing machine makes at the end of its cycle. Baby’s favorite foods are colored green and sometimes orange. Baby trusts the sound of Joe’s voice – on the days when he comes home early from work and fancies himself a spot next to Mary on the couch, with his hand on her swollenness and his monologue on the weather or some such shit, Baby laughs that gentle metallic laugh and asks softly for more. Mary would like to tell Joe about it, but she’s lost enough points carrying alien spawn as it is, so she keeps Baby’s thoughts to herself and restricts their conversations to subjects they share just between them – reading Virginia Woolf out loud on the toilet and narrating her cooking adventures in the kitchen.

She doesn’t tell Mr. L what’s going on during their weekly checkups. She figures he knows already, what with that prescient wisdom of his that carries Love Lakers of all ages to his door, asking for sugar or books or advice or a couple of the odd brain-shaped fruits from the tree in his yard. There is a moment when he does her twentieth week ultrasound where he goes strangely quiet watching the tadpole thing fluttering around inside her, as if he’s listening to Baby tell Mary in that moment **_09@3 &_ ** **That tickles! I’m lonely!** **_?%19$#_ **

She asks him to be Baby’s doctor after he’s born – mostly as a formality, as Mister L is _everyone_ ’s doctor in The Valley. He tells her, “Of course,” and his tone is irritable, sarcastic, but it comes with a benevolent blink of those dark glass bead eyes. 

Mary gives birth in the bathtub on Christmas night. She’s flipping through Cosmo while Joe cleans up the Cornish hen carcasses downstairs. Without warning, the water goes pink and she is being pulled by her middle _downwards_ into the earth’s core itself, and before Joe can scramble his drunken ass all the way upstairs at the sound of her screaming in shock more than pain, she is there belly-deep in bloody water with a Granny Smith infant bobbing up between her legs, staring at her with eyes the size of baby worlds. 

“Oh!” she says.

Baby smiles, and it reaches all the way up to his unearthly blue eyes. It would be creepy if they weren’t such great friends already.

They name him John after Joe’s late father, and in bed with him clean and green on her chest, Mary calls him _Johnny_ for the very first time. The name is slippery like honey, viscous and golden-colored, collected in a tablespoon and slipped between her lips onto her tongue. Joe gripes a bit about having a son the color of fresh peas, but Mary is quick to shush him, to remind him, “He might remember you said that later.” She lays his calloused hand on Johnny’s back. She puts the _Master of Reality_ album on the turntable. Joe tells her he’s going to turn the thermostat up, something about _Christmas nights in this godforsaken desert_. Johnny falls asleep on the spot.

* * *

When he is five years-old Johnny Christ climbs onto the roof of 107 Deadtree Avenue for the fist time. Up the brass drainpipe with muddy green hands and muddy green feet. The house is in turmoil for all of an hour and a half in the feverish pursuit of him, Momma and Daddy searching under beds and behind bookcases and one unfathomably stupid moment when Joe opens the fridge, “Just in case!” – but then it occurs to Mary to step outside into the backyard and that’s when she finds him, alit on the edge of the roof and swinging his verdant legs to-and-fro, eyes cast up towards the cotton candy sky. There is the daytime moon. There are the weather vanes atop the houses of Love Lake Valley, useless and so very dumb. There is Mister L’s great observatory in the distance, the tallest thing in The Valley. Mary Christ waves at her son. He smiles and waves back.

When he is seven years-old Johnny Christ brings the cockroaches outside and releases them into the front yard, humming Megadeth and wiping his hands on Momma’s oversized hand-me-down Zeppelin tee. The first time Mary catches him doing it with Gabby hovering there over his bony little shoulder, murmuring what sounds like, “Aw, man, I was gonna eat those later,” she’s caught slightly off guard. Those bugs were dead on the floor the last time she saw them.

When he is nine years-old Johnny Christ draws a map of Love Lake Valley. He’s used to walking the streets with Momma and Daddy on Sunday afternoons with Gabby in tow on her leash, usually saying pitiful dehumanizing things like, “Bark,” and “Bow-wow.” He’s been in city center enough times that he knows the orientation of the shopping center relative to the Fuel and Wash relative to the opera house and the hotel relative to _Sarah Li’s All-American Diner_ , full of old folksy, jukeboxy, poodle sweatery Americana charm; _Dragon Dance_ , an Asian buffet bookended by Chinese liondogs and Japanse frosted glass art; _The Cosmic Pizza_ , decorated like a planetarium with a fake hyperreal galaxy reflected onto the ceiling; and _Dios Los Bendiga_ , a one-room Latin grill. Johnny paints the map with his mother’s water colors. Uses a pressed wildflower as the compass rose. The map is hung above his bed on the wall with red and yellow safety pins.

When he is eleven years-old Johnny Christ tells his mother goodnight in Mandarin. “晚安, 媽媽,” he says. When she asks him where he learned to speak Chinese, he reminds her briefly of the book he’d read in the pawn shop earlier that afternoon, _The New Practical Chinese Reader_ by Rong Hong Liao. He’d spent all of ten minutes flipping through it, and now suddenly here he is – the reincarnation of Pu Yi. 

When he is thirteen years-old Johnny Christ begins to speak to the plants. At first it’s just innocuous shit like naming them _Boogie_ and _Dynasty_ and _Fletcher Gray_ , but then it’s whole conversations after school about cute boys and girls from class earlier and the metallic taste of the water down here and the beauty of their colors, Johnny and his plant buddies, how much they happen to resemble each other as primarily grassy inhabitants of this barren desert valley. For years the plants will remember Johnny’s words and will bend and arch into his green touch and the sound of his adolescent voice. His first lovers were his mother’s wildflowers.

When he is fifteen years-old Johnny Christ is cooking lasagna every week, strategizing pasta, tomato sauce, ricotta, yellow squash. He tells Momma about the empty space on the bottom shelf of the fridge that screams at him in the middle of the night, shrieking bansheelike and desperate across the house to where he lies wide-awake in bed, homework done and bath taken and yet still tick-tocking wide awake like clocks that never turn off even when it’s nighttime because it’s their job to stay on top of things. Mary tells him to close those peepers and not open them until morning. Instead, he lies in bed, queues Judas Priest and Mötley Crüe up on his iPod, and talks to Gabby until the sun. 

Harold Penderghast from around the block falls asleep in front of his telescope just about every night. He watches the green kid get on the bus to school and get off in the afternoons, then play catch with Joe Christ in the backyard until the man goes in to take his afternoon nap. Green kid sits in the grass. Gets up when mother tells him so. The family sits around the dinner table in the evening and talks avidly about God knows what. They don’t say grace, and the green kid smiles often. Harold Penderghast takes note. He’ll see something odd one of these days, he just knows it.

* * *

They say that Johnny Christ is a gifted kid, you know. That’s how they say it, with the _you know_ pinned conspiratorially onto the end. They say he could speak full sentences when he was just two years-old and that he spends the afternoons laying in his bed, just thinking. Who ever heard of kids who _think?_

They say that he – a tenth grader – has a college-age reading level and runs faster than all those long-legged praying mantisses in the Olympics. They say he actually understands Shakespeare and his term paper won some award last year. That’s why he goes to the special classes where they play chess and listen to Jack Johnson. That’s why even the most intensely xenophobic of the teachers say things to the bad kids like, “Why can’t you be more like Johnny?” That’s why the flowers bloom bigger and the grass grows greener in the places frequented by him in desert wasteland where they live – big and green like Love Lakers have only ever seen in Mister L’s yard, not that anyone’s really keeping track.

Love Lake Valley hasn’t ever really seen his kind before, you see, at least not in the same context. The last time someone got abudcted and knocked up by some weird green flowerdick from the other side of the asteroid belt, the baby saw maybe a month of life before the parents drowned it in the kitchen sink, or perhaps shipped it off to a convent in Nova Scotia – one can never be sure which story is true. Johnny Christ is sixteen years-old this week, unique in both his nature as well as his longevity. He’s on the verge of an epiphany while he puts up his own birthday decorations alongside Momma.

“Momma?”

“What’s up, pea pod?”

“Why am I so different?”

Mary Christ ties a balloon screaming _HAPPY BIRTHDAY_ to one of the dining chairs in a bunny-eared knot and reaches over to pinch at Johnny’s bouncy copper curls and full left cheek, immediately blushing emerald. “Well, why d’you think? You look like an oasis!”

“That’s not what I mean,” he giggles, and well, Mary knew that already. She’s known it since Gabby exchanged barking for _talking_ , and all because of Johnny’s pre- and neonatal influence, it seems. She knows his overwhelming otherness is so much more intersectional than simply his coloring. She just doesn’t know how to say it.

“You came from someplace far away,” is what Mary Christ eventually tells her birthday boy. He still sits on her lap from time to time, ridiculously long and gangly as he is, when he feels particularly loving or particularly scared. Today on Christmas Eve, with their decorations that match his coloring and the tree twinkling bright in the background, Johnny rocks back and forth on Momma’s thighs and tries to remember where from whence he arrived. He thinks he’s getting warmer when he sinks to his knees on the ugly parque floor and presses his ear to her belly.

On Christmas Day, the neighbors stop by with a fruitcake that Daddy sticks candles in and calls Johnny’s birthday cake. Momma assures him he’s kidding, but Johnny eats a couple of pieces on the roof later anyway, saying, “Mmmm.” He takes in The Valley from his perch, the hunchback camel lady milling along the sandy street and the titular Love Lake, shaped like a lopsided kindergarten heart. On the sidewalk, neighborhood kids trample and shriek with their brand new water guns; one of them spies Johnny on the roof and hollers, “Hey, freak!”

“Hey!” says Johnny.

“Come play, we’ve got extra guns!”

Violence has never been Johnny’s style, and he’s a bit too old for water guns, but he’s never going to be friends with the whole wide world without making a few compromises. He climbs down.


	2. MISSION

#  _MISSION_

_all hail our messiah: the quarterback!_

All of The Valley knows that Mr. Jean Baptiste is a kind and crazy man. A semi-seasoned college football coach fresh out of wherever he was fresh out of, he arrived in the late 80s looking like the rugged pornstar archangel that was all the rage in those days, a saint in the vein of Tom Selleck or Burt Reynolds. Nowadays, though, he’s coaching high school gridiron, prematurely snowy, and a touch paunchy in the middle. Still smiling, though. Still wearing Hawaiian print and smoking doobies with his boys and smiling.

Tryouts this season are held in late summer before the start of the school year proper. Johnny Christ, sixteen years-old, stands bouncing on the balls of his feet in line between the transfer students from Nigeria – James and Yahya Ejiofor, fraternal twins and somehow opposites in almost all things (especially stature) – and Simon “Peter” Bethesda, the senior who showed up in highlighter orange crocs and a fishing hat with handmade tackles in the band. Jean Baptiste shouts firm yet jolly instruction from a polyester folding chair while Jude, the community college TA in charge of the water cooler, whistles around cigarette butts over his shoulder and eyes each new and old player appreciatively, like he knows something they don’t. He probably does. Age will do that to you.

Johnny runs laps faster than the fastest: Philip. He pushes sleds harder than the strongest: Thad. When Tommy Kapoor tackles him to the ground in a mock scrimmage and Johnny has him winded and alone in the middle of the field, wondering where the hell the alien boy went, in well under five seconds, he can see the proud and not at all disconcerting glints in Coach Baptiste and Jude’s eyes where they stand near the bleachers, chatting inaudibly. 

Barty Sarkisian says something like, “Holy shit, bruh,” to him in a voice that verges on idolatrous when Coach calls time for the afternoon. Big, hulking Thaddeus Jury grins at him with all of his shiny white teeth and claps him lovingly on the back. Peter and Andrew corner him in the locker room later and give Johnny their creased and sweaty phone numbers, make him promise to text them if he wants to “hang, whatever, whenever.” Later in his backyard, icing his calves and thighs with Saran wrap and Ziploc, Johnny tells his mother he’s never really been liked before today, to which she replies, “Bullshit. _I’ve_ always liked you.”

“I was _born_ to be liked by you.”

“It still counts.”

“I guess.” He’s more than half sure he agrees with her.

Callbacks are at 6:30 PM at the Love Lake pier exactly a week later. Johnny decides to bike there himself and save Momma the gas. Eleven moderately muscled high school boys sit on the edge of the pier, shooting the shit and exchanging rumors passed down from past seasons, until Jean Baptiste pulls up in his Subaru and steps out with Jude in nothing but swim trunks, asking the congregation, “Who’s first, boys?”

Johnny’s always been good at answering _that_ particular call.

They strip him down to his undies. He’s never been so breathtakingly green in so public a space. One by one they all leap into Love Lake, screaming like hooligans and crying out in anxiety, in humor, in delight, and when Coach Baptiste puts his hands on Johnny’s head and pushes him beneath the clear water for _one_ , _two_ , _three_ seconds, baptizing him as the newborn quarterback of the Love Lake Valley Miracles and laughing, “Congratulations, kid!” well – there’s just something about it all.

 _Woooooo_ . _Bbblblblblbbl_. Such are the loving sounds of the heart-shaped lake. Such are the sounds of new friends, new family.

The first thing Johnny sees when he surfaces is the curious face of old Mister L, peering out the window of his lake house with narrowed if not exactly suspicious eyes. Because it’s polite, Johnny smiles at him. Mister L may or may not smile back.

* * *

Johnny walks to the quarry the day before school starts. It’s windy out, and it would be an off day if _every_ day in The Valley wasn’t an off day – the sandstorm last week and Love Lake going blood red every October, frog and locust swarms every time neighbors begin to quarrel, summer snows. He grabs Daddy’s windbreaker off the coat tree and slips his lean greenness into it before stepping out into the desert.

The kids from the hood call him _Jolly Green Giant_ or, when they start feeling more creative, a _Leprechaun_. He passes them back their lost Frisbees with a grin and goes on along his way.

The old Rodriguez house by the Fuel and Wash looms over passersby like a great beached ship – round windows on the second floor and the chimney like a mast before the curved eastside wall of the home. Johnny tries to remember the story right, that old Valley legend about the week it rained nonstop after the builders moved in and Javier Rodriguez went mad and raped his own father, something gruesome like that. There are handfuls upon handfuls of strange tales like that in just about every house or household in Love Lake Valley. Johnny knows that _he’s_ a strange tale. 

McDonalds on the corner screams today’s value meal at him. _MONDAY: BIG MACS FOR $5!!_ Johnny kind of wants to pop in and get some fries, but Momma would be pissed if he ate right before dinner and there’s kudzu climbing over the building and the golden arches, into the parking lot and reaching for employee’s cars in the back. He walks up to the vacant drive-thru window and asks only for a medium root beer. When the lady asks if she can touch his skin, he politely shakes his head _no_.

A young woman is sitting on the sidewalk near the junkyard when Johnny begins to skirt the edge of town. She’s smoking a cigarette and scraping the pad of her thumb across the touchscreen of her first generation smartphone. Glancing through round Lennon lenses at Johnny’s approach, she says, “What’s up, QB?”

“What?”

“You’re our new quarterback, aren’t you?” She blows smoke out of the side of her mouth and reaches a hand out to grab him briefly by the shin. “You’re so pretty! I’m Maryam, by the way.”

She’s the one who spends her evenings in the dancehall and strolls into school at third period looking like she spent the night in the first circle of hell. Teachers side-eye her in the hall and the neighbors with kids talk about her as a cautionary tale. She has gold leaf in her skin and a thick halo of ringlets around her lovely head. Johnny thinks he loves her like, immediately. 

“Where are you going?” she asks.

“The quarry,” Johnny says. “Wanna come?”

Maryam scoffs. She made the decision _yesterday_ . “ _Ch’yeah_.”

Maryam walks in step with him past the junkyard and reads ya momma out loud to him. They laugh with the fervor of young children. The quarry emerges all at once on the horizon, all shades of orange, white, and brown in sour candy strip bands where the sandstone canyon drops suddenly downward into the earth. There’s a diamondback following Johnny and Maryam when they stop to peer over the edge at the mining vehicles with their dinosaur necks for cranes; Maryam just about jumps out of her skin, but Johnny takes the rattling rope into his hands and tells it, “Hi, there!”

“What, are you fucking crazy?” Maryam says, meaning the best definition of the word. 

“A little,” Johnny admits. That smile of his could buckle knees from time to time. He lets the diamondback slither down his thigh and around his calf, rest its head on his red right Converse with flicking tongue and blinking sleepy eyes. 

Maryam watches the spectacle until her heartrate slows and she asks another question: “Are you scared?”

Johnny wants to hold her hand, but settles for simple eye contact. “Nope.” Not of the _snake_ anyway.

* * *

Football season is an abridged affair in Love Lake Valley. There have been far too many instances of team buses from other schools in the district getting lost on their way to The Valley – in storms and on the interstate and the memorable ‘96 season when they drove around the block between Ambassador and Vulcan about fifteen times before they could even spot the football field – and as a result, there are only enough playable teams to last the Miracles until late October rather than all the way into December. Still, there is no shortage of team spirit in The Valley, so when the Miracles host their homecoming bake sale on the sidewalk in front of the high school, it seems that all 4097 Love Lakers come down from all corners and neighborhoods to munch on the 90¢ lemon bars and 75¢ brownies handed out by Coach Baptiste and his right hand Jude.

The team bakes the goods in the home ec classroom and emerges covered in flour and lemon juice, elbowing each other and eating the dropped bars and brownies right off the floor. Barty stands on the sidewalk waving down old ladies and young children – the weakest of the flock – while Johnny and Thomas arrange the sweets on the fold-up table with fingers as delicate as they can possibly make them. Jude hands the boys water when they start wilting beneath the oppressive Southwestern sun, and when Johnny is the only one of them to murmur a quick, “Thank you,” the responding grin is a heart-flipper.

It makes Johnny think of the day he got on the floor and listened to Momma’s stomach.

Jude asks him questions he’s heard about three-hundred times in his sixteen-year life. _Can you read minds?_ – to which the answer comes _No, duh_ – and _Who’s your dad?_ – to which Johnny replies _The guy who tiled your mom’s kitchen two years back_. It’s just about to get annoying when Jude just stops and wordlessly watches Johnny sip his Dasani for awhile, and after the silence punctuated only by Barty’s manic yelling at Mrs. Musoka and all seven of her grandchildren starts to get real good and comfortable, Jude tilts his head just to the left and says, “What do you like to listen to, QB?”

Weird how that’s become a stand-in for his name nowadays. Weirder still how good it makes Johnny feel.

“I don’t know. Hard stuff, guitars. Black Sabbath and metal like that.”

Jude pauses to hand Coach Baptiste two dimes in change and wave off his irritated huffing – “Stop yakking and pay attention, Judy.” – before turning back to Johnny with a hot butter smile and saying, “I’ve got a few records I’m trying to get rid of. I’ll let you have them if you win the game for us.”

Johnny rolls his gel pen ice princess eyes. “I’m not the only player on the team, you know.”

“Aren’t you?’ _Wink-wink_.

 _Wink-wink_. Last time we checked, stomachs weren’t made out of pancake batter.

Next weekend, the Love Lake Valley Miracles play the Saint Rose Devils and win 25-to-17. Barty comes out of the game with his face red like flames and a compound fracture in his right tibia. Johnny sits with him on the floor of the locker room while they wait for an ambulance from the nearest metropolitan area; he smooths his palms over the ripped flesh and speaks kindly to the exposed honeycomb marrow, just trying to calm the guy down mostly, until it’s fifteen minutes later and the EMTs walk in with their stretchers and Barty’s skin and bone has stitched itself back together, leaving behind only a nasty ass plum purple hematoma pooling beneath the skin as evidence that anything even happened.

Johnny thinks he’s going to get in trouble for it. Coach Baptiste offers him a vodka-laced Gatorade instead.

“Drink up, champ.” Jean Baptiste’s breath almost always smells at least somewhat like marijuana, but tonight the stench is almost overpowering. “You’ve got college in your future, I can see it, and you’re gonna bring this whole team right along with you.”

He should feel terrified in that moment, really, but the Ejiofor twins are literally dancing him around the locker room and Peter’s calling him the _King of Kings_ after only one game, so no. No terror for now, only greatness.

* * *

The Bethesda brothers and Matthew Levi ask Johnny to sign up for the extracurricular yoga class with them. The idea comes to Peter as they’re walking to lunch from fourth period English, when the four of them are a tall jocky wad of human taffy jammed up against the wall while the freshmen stampede past, suddenly in a feeding frenzy at the mere whiff of cafeteria-issue cheese pizza. Peter’s shoulder ends up plastered just next to the sign-up sheet on Ms. Deering’s door; he nods towards it while tugging on the tail of Johnny’s shirt, asks, “Hey, you want in?”

Johnny figures why not. Coach is always telling them to get as much extra exercise as possible. They sign their names with Andrew’s blue Sharpie and scribble in an apology in Bic when the ink bleeds through the sheet onto the door itself.

The closest Johnny has been to this is Momma’s Richard Simmons vids on VHS, the ones she exercised to when he was little. Peter and Matthew struggle with tree pose and balancing stick, while Johnny himself seems almost to levitate. Later that night when Johnny showers the sweat and tension off of him, soft electricity burns in his epidermis, bending the water around him in shapes of walking stick-men and thick rainstorm clouds. When he gets irritated with the disruption of normal physics, it all stops just as suddenly as it started – water sliding off of his yellow-green skin and down into the drain as it does every night. 

The Thursday night before Game 3, Johnny picks up Maryam Mirdamadi in her favorite Lennon glasses and rides with her perched on his bike’s handlebars until they reach The Valley’s one trailer park. He tells Momma and Daddy he’s going to do homework with Peter and be in bed by ten, but when he knocks on the door of 616 Zazel Circle, Jude is the one answering, with a ballpoint pen in his mocha ponytail and a joint between his lips.

“Told you to be here at seven sharp,” he says, eyeballing the two teenagers with mostly veiled interest.

Johnny would say something, but Maryam beats him to it – dangling the six-pact of Schlitz in front of Jude’s face and piping, “We brought beer?”

Jude acts like he’s considering letting them in. Johnny threatens to leave, smiling, and smiling as well, Jude steps out of the doorway with an expansive wave of the arm. “Welcome home, whippersnappers!”

He teaches them – mostly Johnny – how to roll their own cigs, how to not inhale, how to pucker their lips just right, and spends twenty straight minutes getting Maryam up to speed on every divine act Johnny has accomplished in the past two weeks. Every godlike pass and his homemade chocolate chip cookies that put those old bake sale lemon bars to shame, even that shit he pulled in yoga class told to him by James who was told by Barty who was told by Andrew. Maryam laughs, delighted, until she spills cheap beer on Johnny’s bare feet; as she mops the mess with Kleenex and kisses each of Johnny’s wiggly green toes in apology, Jude turns to Johnny and asks him, “Are you perfect?”

Johnny laughs, higher than six stories and so damn dopey. “No!”

Jude does that thing he’s done more and more often lately, that half-flirtatious and sleepy smiling that might easily get him fired for inappropriate conduct one day. “I’m disinclined to believe you.” But it’s the truth.

When they put on pop-punk at volume 35 and dance around the room like fools, Johnny laughs until the tears start to run; Maryam kisses those, too. He has not done his homework for tomorrow and the fact of it means to kill him. His muscles and cranium have felt rather heavy since Game 1’s victory, dragging invisibly in the hallways at school and drooping down over his dinner plate in the evening. He’s trying, he’s trying, he’s trying harder than he even knows how to verbalize.

In bed, with the bad girl’s dark curl-infested head on his chest and the college student’s hand lingering low on his waist, Johnny is the most glorious, dishonest, terrifyingly smart teenager currently in Love Lake Valley, and the world is bigger than it has ever been.

* * *

Johnny Christ sits in a lawn chair on the lakefront with a Reader’s Digest in his lap. They’re playing Jimmy Eat World in the Snack Shack while Momma eats her pasta salad out of a red Solo cup and argues with Daddy about visiting his folks in Radiator Springs for the holidays, her citing each variety of irritable and sideways look that comes hurtling Johnny’s way every year they happen to make the drive. The air is still and heavy in the late summer/early fall, and the mosquitos seem to be singing and especially fat on this Saturday afternoon. The Christs are in a celebratory mood.

In Game 5 of the Love Lake Valley football season, the Miracles walloped the Idlewild Archangels in a match that ended 30-to-9. With their stringbean receivers and shoddy defense, the Archangels stood no chance. Every time Johnny closes his eyes or stops actively thinking long enough, he is brought hurtling back to his teammates throwing him over their padded shoulders and running him around the field they’d just won, back to Coach Baptiste and Jude – _especially_ Jude – watching him parade past with such faith and adoration in their eyes, back to the victory kiss Maryam gave him on the sidelines with her tongue licking so lovingly and not even all that greedily into his mouth, _oooh!_ The feeling of popping corn suddenly in his gut all over again. 

“Do you want to go to your Dad’s parents’ house for your birthday, baby?” Momma asks him with abrupt, irritated urgency. She’s trying to win the argument, Johnny knows, but he’s been in the clouds and in Maryam’s mouth for the past five minutes or so, so it takes him a second or two to find an answer.

“Uh. I don’t know?”

“’ _I don’t_ _know_ ’ is practically ‘ _yes_ ,’” Daddy says from Momma’s other side, reaching over with his plastic fork to steal a few noodles from her cup.

“’ _I don’t know_ ’ is him trying not to hurt your feelings because he really wants to say, ‘ _no, God, please God_ _no_.’” Mary parries Joe’s fork with her own until it retreats with only a single rotini. “We’re not going! I’m not going to argue with you about this!”

“Oh yeah,” Joe scoffs. “You’re doing a great job of that, baby.”

Johnny’s attention has drifted once more, but not back into the recesses of his memory. Instead, he is watching the big pink men further down the lakefront, throwing him and his parents – mostly him, to be fair – dirty looks painted around the edges with red. They have ice chests and beach towels. They’re muttering between themselves. When he tries, when he makes his head hurt with the effort of looking so closely, Johnny can see their skeletons and their hearts beating in pericardial bags full of fluid, gout accumulating around their big toe-bones, stomach acid splashing ever upwards into the lower esophagus, their last Prilosecs dissolving into their bloodstreams. He can hear them as they muster up the audacity to speak louder, calling him ‘ _ugly green freak_ ’ and ‘ _alien boy_ ’. He can feel the fear and the resentment radiating off of them in thick, heady waves, the vibes contagious and almost hungry. He gets up to go read under the awning of the Snack Shack, and Momma and Daddy continue bickering there on the lakefront and later in the car and even over dinner, until Daddy gives up and yells, “Alright, woman! We’ll stay here!”

It isn’t the first argument Momma has won through sheer persistence.

That night, Johnny dreams that he is being buried in the football field with blood in his mouth. He wakes in a cold sweat, sheets clinging to him like old, iron-heavy cobwebs, with the distinct feeling that he’s seen into the future. He goes downstairs to get a glass of water and runs into Momma in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette into the stove vent. When he tells her about the pink men’s hearts from earlier, she smiles at having been told such a secret.


	3. PASSION

#  _PASSION_

_he even bleeds green._

Game 7 of the Love Lake season is played at home. The Radiator Springs Soldiers arrive with an air of tyrannical and vaguely horrifying normalcy that juts out physically into the air of The Valley, coloring the air around them in less saturated hues. Soldiers QB Cassius “Cassie” Pilot is deceptively unassuming when he first steps onto the field surrounded by his pack – a slip, svelte guy of only 5’7”, eyes dark and birdlike set deep in his face over an aquiline nose. The Miracles watch him from the sidelines as if he is seven feet tall and wider than a school bus.

Q1 is gridlock. Johnny Christ is intercepted a whopping three times by the Radiator Springs cornerback and held face down in the green by him with surprising, unprecedented viciousness. When James and Philip, the cornerstones of the Miracles’ defense as alternating left and right tackles, apologize for not being able to protect Johnny, Johnny shrugs them off with his characteristic serene and loving smile, dabbing a spot of emerald blood from the place over his left eye and panting, “No worries.” Each team scores (1) field goal. Three points have never come so hard for the Miracles.

Q2 and Q3 pass in similar fashion. Linebackers Tommy and Thad blitz every chance they get, successfully rushing Cassie Pilot out of bounds twice in one quarter, but then the Soldiers tight end makes a touchdown and it’s playing the catch-up game for twelve unbearable minutes of heavy breathing, screaming muscles, and manic joy – a brand of delight lightyears away from the summer vacation sort of happiness the Miracles have felt for the six games prior. Johnny and Barty execute a successful Hail Mary pass in the final seconds of the third quarter amid the wild shrieking of Simon in the bleachers – the crazed, overzealous sophomore who has attended every game like a Baptist church since the start of the season. The score is 11-to-10. The Miracles are just barely winning.

In the interim before the fourth quarter, guzzling Gatorade on the bench, Johnny trades looks across the field with Cassie Pilot. At first he thinks it’s a simply curious mutual watching between two star high school quarterbacks, that there might even be kinship somewhere in the space between them, but then Cassie Pilot bares his teeth and crosses his eyes at him with such unmistakable malice before laughing inaudibly and turning his back on  him, and Johnny is left feeling the pottery shaken if not broken on the shelf inside of him.

“I can’t believe you guys pulled through.” Jude drives him home after the game with his hands hooked carelessly over the top of the steering wheel. “I mean, of  _ course _ you pulled through because you’re you and we have you–”

“There is no  _ having _ of me, Jude–”

“But twenty-to-nineteen? Haven’t had a game that close all season.”

Johnny stares without replying out of the window at Love Lake Valley at night, at pink, yellow, and blue neon lights and young adults walking down the streets on legs that teeter just a tad. He’s out of his uniform and in his mother’s old t-shirt and sweats, smelling like locker room soap and desperate victory. He floats somewhere slightly outside of the car until Jude reaches across the center console and puts his hand on his thigh, just a little proprietary but mostly… mostly  _ loving _ , if we’re to be completely honest with each other.

“What’s up, champ?” He coos it like he would to a lover.

“Buy me orange juice?” Johnny asks.

At the Mars Mart, a twenty ounce bottle of Minute Maid is three whole dollars. Jude bitches all the way up to the counter but pays in all quarters – “It was laundry day yesterday, okay?” he explains when Johnny gives him a look. After Johnny has taken one long, greedy sip from recyclable plastic – Adam’s apple bobbing hard in the otherwise uninterrupted line of his throat – Jude reaches over to caress the back of his copper head, to pull him over and kiss him square and firm on the mouth.

It’s wrong, kissing a nineteen year-old teaching student who smokes marijuana and may possibly have a rap sheet. Johnny closes his eyes into it and aggressively decides he does not care.

* * *

Philip’s father owns the Mediterranean place downtown.  _ Helios _ , it’s called, the sign in the front embellished with a fat golden Agamemnon mask. The Sunday night after their narrow victory over Radiator Springs, Mr. Papaspyros treats the whole team and their assistant coach to supper at the long table near the blushing back corner of the restaurant, the one with terrific rose-colored ambiance and positioned just beneath the television broadcasting Lebanese singing competition shows at almost all hours of the day. 

The boys squabble not all that seriously over slices of white pita and plates of garlicy hummus. Yahya, the Casanova of the team, regales the table with tidbits from his latest sexual conquest in the garish and kind of gross way that teenage boys do – all the nastiest details accompanied by crude demonstrations with his hands, fingers, and spare semicircle of pita until Tommy is begging him to, “Stop, please, before Dr. Pepper goes shooting out of Judy’s nose.” After the gyros and shawarma have come out on elaborate silver platters carried by waiters not much older than the congregated teenagers, Philip calls his father over and asks, anime-eyed, if they can’t have ‘ _ just a little bit _ ’ of the Agiorgitiko; instead of using the shot glasses, Papa Papaspryos brings them the big ass Bordeauxs and leaves a mere inch of air in each for every team member, maybe a half-inch for Jude.

It occurs to Johnny that he’s never drank so much since he started playing football. Is that how this was supposed to work?

He has two glasses of red. He says the words ‘ _ I love you _ ’ more than he’s ever said them in his life.  _ I love you, Peter. I love you, Andrew. _ At the edge of eight-thirty, twelve hyenas stumble out of  _ Helios _ – all grape-sweet and whooping with laughter. Jude wants to drive Johnny home again, asks him if he can with this wine-dark look in his eyes, promising him things, but Johnny tells him he needs to walk his buzz off and takes the route home that swings him around Love Lake, down the street with all the tall cucumber houses that started this town.

He stops in front of Mister L’s yard and admires the bloody orange fruit in the tree that might pass for a willow to anyone not paying attention. There is thick red liquid somewhere inside him that threatens to overflow into his mouth or out of his eyes and ears. Johnny is on the verge of crossing the threshold into the grass, climbing up into the tree to sit and sleep and  maybe eat a brainy fruit or two, when the front door comes open and there’s Mister L in all his green-skinned, black-eyed glory. He’s fixated on sweeping detritus out onto the doorstep initially, mumbling in some indiscernible foreign language Johnny has never heard before –  _ Esperanto maybe? _ – but then he notices the slightly drunk teenager standing on the sidewalk looking lost and his whole manner goes still and soft.

“What’s up, Johnny?” he asks in his voice that seems constantly to echo.

“M’on my way home,” Johnny says.

Mister L nods briefly in the direction of his car in the yard, some kind of George Jetson sporty thing. “You wanna ride?”

Johnny shakes his head and gives him a honeyed smile. “I’m good with walking.”

Mister L waves Johnny off into the night and steps back inside his house without another word. When Johnny makes it home, he tiptoes upstairs so as to not disturb his parents where they’re chatting and washing dishes and maybe even kissing a little in the kitchen. He makes a beeline for his bed, pulling clothes and shoes off all the way down onto the mattress. Maryam texts him a mere second later –  _ what are u doing? _

There goes his t-shirt over the edge of the mattress and onto the floor.  _ i was just thinking about you! i just got home from dinner. _

_ aw bae. i love u!! <3 _

Johnny cradles the flame in his chest and rolls around and around. _i love you, too._

* * *

Johnny Christ is killed on a Friday. It is the last thing he expects to happen to him on that day. After school and after practice, he and Jude stay behind to pack the football sleds into the gym and load what’s left of the cooler into the trunk of Jude’s red hooptie before making their way beneath the bleachers and kissing each other’s mouths deep and vibrant Christmas colors – Jude’s red close to cherry and Johnny’s shiny candy apple green. Johnny has the feeling, with bare palms slipping up the front of his practice jersey and pressing  _ in _ and  _ down _ , that some of his team members have begun to notice signs of the bizarre ménage a trois between him, Maryam, and their very much legal assistant coach. He also has the feeling of total calm and total devotion, so he takes it in his hand and fists it along with fingerfuls of Jude’s thick brown hair.

He doesn’t hear the purr of an ’03 Chevy Impala as it pulls up beside the football field and idles for seven minutes before cutting out. Jude is busy pushing him down into the grass and they are rolling around, giggling like boys. He doesn’t hear the roaming, romping footsteps of a quarterback and his offensive linemen, the derisive whistles, the hocking of loogies. Off come the shoulder pads and the football gloves. He doesn’t hear Cassie Pilot and his faithful Soldiers until they are ducking behind the bleachers and finding him lip-locked with an adult, but by then, it is too late and there is too much laughter for it all to be anything but absolutely mortifying.

“You’re just the one I was looking for, alien boy.” Cassie Pilot grins with transparent blood on his teeth. “Isn’t this a sight to see?”

The Soldiers certainly seem to agree.

Jude is swiftly dispatched with an aluminum baseball bat to the nape. Johnny wrestles and yowls in the Soldiers’ grip like an enraged cat all the way into the Chevy’s trunk, with jump ropes Granny knotted first around his ankles and then around his wrists. For ten minutes, he raises hell in the overwhelming darkness and meager space of eighteen cubic feet – screaming his poor green head off, kicking and kicking and _kicking_ in the general direction of the left tail light so that he might break through, but by minute twenty, he’s all  hollered out, throat in shreds, legs on fire. When they finally drag him back into the sunlight, they’re on the edge of the quarry.

He doesn’t know where the barbed wire comes from. It’s been so long since he’s been to the hardware store, since his weekend trips with Daddy when they perused Black and Decker drills and paint color sample cards that he’d later pin to his wall. He used to pick his own scabs, but he’s never seen his own bleeding like this – regurgitated in a thick olive slop when Pilot pounds his abdomen with the baseball bat like he’s poultry he’s trying to tenderize, running into his eyes when the Soldiers wind his noggin up in a tiara of metal thorns.

It only hurts once or twice. It’s just a handful of broken bones.  _ It’ll be okay _ , Johnny thinks. He can walk right home after and it’ll all be fine.

“They’ll never suspect us, you know.” Cassie Pilot stoops to speak to him. “In this freak town, they’ll just assume one of any of you weirdos did it.”

Spitting liquid moss, Johnny replies in a croak. “I’m so thirsty.”

“Yeah?” Pilot drives the heel of his foot into Johnny’s jaw and grinds  _ down _ . “Me too, champ.”

The police find him two days later, wrapped in a tarp and thrown into the quarry’s gaping mouth. When Mary and Joe Christ drive to the morgue to identify the body, Mary is brought back to the midnight conversations she used to eavesdrop on through her bedroom wall, Johnny and Gabby chatting to each other about their favorite TV shows and favorite flowers and favorite sidewalk cracks and favorite desserts, how fresh the apple pie was tonight, how big and round and blue the moon looks in the window,  _ is that a man? Yes, I can see him! _ Joe tries to hold her hand before they step into the room with all the drawers, but she keeps her everything pocketed and stiff. She cannot be touched.

Johnny’s face is a great emerald bruise.

“Is this your son, ma’am?”

Mary finds the window with her eyes. She murmurs, “Oh yes.”

* * *

They have the funeral at home. The church in town seems, strangely enough, too sad for a funeral – _sad_ in a pitiful, plastic flower, wet dog that’s been beaten sort of way; _sad_ like glossy toy coins caught in a sewer grate; _sad_ like the day after Halloween when dirty candy litters the streets and just lays there under the sun; just _sad_. The Christs opt for a closed casket. Initially Mary thinks it’s too overtly Emmett Till to broadcast Johnny’s swollen and busted jade face to the whole wide world, but then it’s twenty minutes into the memorial service and she is absolutely _furious_ and she _wants_ them to see it. She wants them all to see it. She wants to give them a guided tour of every laceration and blister and poorly-disguised hematoma on her son’s beautiful head and say, “Look at that. Isn’t he the most wonderful thing you’ve ever seen in your life?”

To her he is. To her, he’s as perfect as he was the day he was born.

Inside the house, teenage footballers and the neighbors mill awkwardly about around the eggy hors d’oeuvres, alternately blinking away tears and saying contrite things about  _ I remember when Johnny used to _ and  _ Why did he have to go so soon? _ Mr. Jean Baptiste intermittently makes this awful keening sound that silences the entire house in its gut-wrenching, toe-curling pain, how loved Johnny was by him. Mister L never makes an appearance, but – wonder of wonders – the ill-reputed Mirdamadi girl shows up with a bouquet of handpicked wildflowers just as Mary’s getting around to lighting her third shaky-handed cigarette on the porch; for all of five seconds she stands about a yard away from Mary in a satiny slip of a black dress, watching her wet-eyed like she would watch a spooked animal, before she finally steps closer with her own Zippo outstretched, murmuring, “Let me get that for you.”

Mary sniffs wetly –  _ gross _ . “Thank you, baby.”

Mirdamadi gives her an intensely tired smile in reply. “No problem.”

Johnny’s teammates are pallbearers for the afternoon, loading their beloved quarterback into the back of the hearse. Tranquil Sleep Cemetery is just a six minute drive from 107 Deadtree. Before they lower her boy into the ground and he passes out of her life and into the unknown earth forever, Mary lays her forehead against the casket lid and makes kisses until the shape of her lips is permanently eroded and embossed  into the wood. Joe has begun to cry; Mary finally deigns to hold his hand.

Later, still standing around in the graveyard like they’ve been glued heels-first to the ground, Simon “Peter” Bethesda starts talking to the Mirdamadi girl and Mrs. Gardinier from across the street about the time he and Johnny went to the junkyard after practice to drink soda pop and talk shit. He tells them, looking lovestruck, about how their conversation eventually lulled and The Valley’s locusts eventually began to drone their favorite song, how with the old man sun slowly climbing down its ladder for the day, Johnny became enveloped in golden light – a yellow-green lightning bug perched atop their shared mountain of scrap. 

“He was so beautiful. I told myself I’d never forget it.”

Joe comes to tell Mary he’s starting the car. She considers for a moment all the separate and other parts of her son she never really had and will never have a chance to have again – who he loved and where he ran off to and what kind of fears and joys he felt in his deepest and most private self, his sweetest self, his apple’s core – then follows her husband to the parking lot.

When she steps into the bathroom later that night, after all the mourners have left her alone and the leftover hors d’oeuvres have been tossed summarily in the trash and Joe has resigned himself to some horrible classic movie marathon on TCM, she finds that she has started her period and it unleashes a whole new torrent of tears. Gabby toddles into the bathroom halfway through the downpour and lays her silver-speckled head on the top of Mary’s right foot.

“There, there,” she says. Mary doesn’t understand why people always say that in the event of tragedies, but it soothes her, oddly enough. “There, there.”


	4. ASCENSION

#  _ASCENSION_

_have you seen him lately? i saw him last tuesday._

She thought she saw him in the grocery store last week. There he was, nestled between the spinach and the broccoli, sleeping in veggies like the loveliest and most socially inappropriate cherub in the world, but then she turned to look at him dead on and there was nothing but kale. Oodles and oodles of kale. Joe keeps hearing him call him from upstairs. After a year he has learned to stop the reflexive tension in his legs, ready to spring him upwards out of his chair and send him up to the bedroom with the perpetually closed door, but Mary still catches him with his head suddenly raised over his blueprints, listening for the voice.

Sometimes they have the Mirdamadi girl over for Sunday brunch and coffee and she’ll show Mary snapshots in her iPhone’s camera roll undeleted for over twelve months now. There she is with him on his old bike, smiling beneath the midday sun. There they are in the backyard grass, rubbing all over Gabby’s stomach. There they are in a car with the old assistant coach, who died just this past March.

“You know they say they found him with his guts hanging out in the fields by the cow farm,” Maryarm says, flicking through old selfies and snapshots of dinner plates.

Mary smirks. “And who is ‘ _ they _ ’?”

Maryam shrugs. “You know. People.” She’s finishing up her first semester at the community college, studying teaching. Mary finds that she has an almost blinding affection for her in these dinner table moments.

Maryam herself sometimes finds him loitering in her bedroom, standing in front of the closet door or sitting atop the low dresser. It is always in the wee hours of the morning or the early afternoons when she is on the meridian between sleep and waking. He watches her with his cosmic blue eyes until she turns over and catches him looking. She will reach for her glasses on the bedside table and shove them onto her face as fast as she is able, but by then he is already gone, vanished up into the vent in the ceiling.

Love Lake Valley sees Johnny all over the place. It sees him on the lakefront, reading Reader’s Digests and loitering by the Snack Shack. It sees him biking towards the trailer park with his head thrown back in anticipatory delight. It sees him running down the football field – always to the West, always into the sun. It sees him walking upon Love Lake itself before sinking down below.

“I don’t think he’s dead,” Maryam tells Mary while she helps her wash dishes this Sunday. “Not really, anyway.” And maybe she’s right.

Maybe Johnny Christ is still kissing boys and girls and making touchdowns somewhere out there in the strange desert world. Maybe we’re just not looking hard enough.

Let’s be very still and very quiet. Let’s remember to breathe. 

Open our eyes. 

Take a gander. 

Do we see him?

**Author's Note:**

> have a [playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/27ACDMi6Tl2EEcgaYEXDzg?si=XfGnAFsVQFSPmEhMrTEQCQ) for high school existence in the late oughts and early 2010s, which is when this story is supposed to take place. ignore my birth name.


End file.
